Case Study:

Amer Sports and Druva team up for a data privacy win

“From a mobile perspective, the cloud is a great fit. We have a lot of people traveling, a lot of people on the road. When we had on-premise solutions we could not get the coverage or even the speed which Druva offers us.”

Amer Sports, a Finnish holding corporation, is a sporting goods company with internationally recognized brands such as Salomon, Wilson, Atomic, Arc’teryx, Mavic, Suunto and Precor. With many companies operating underneath it, Amer Sports is a global enterprise and has 7,600 employees in 150 locations on nearly every continent. As a company doing business in many different countries, they must comply with a web of data privacy regulations, ranging from data residency to data access and device tracking. And as if this wasn’t challenging enough, the increasingly blurred line between corporate and personal data adds in another level of risk and complication.

Amer Sports needed a reliable endpoint data protection solution that could meet the company’s needs globally. Data needed to be easily available for users from any location, but also be managed in such a way that ensured the company’s compliance with a multitude of privacy regulations. With operations in multiple countries with strict data residency laws, Amer Sports had to consider where the data would reside before implementing any single solution. They had to consider how to manage that data, since some regions would require only employees within that region have administrative access. They also had to balance competing requirements: some regions require all employee data remain confidential and private, whereas others require all data be accessible and available in case of legal or compliance matters.

Druva’s cloud capabilities make inSync the right choice

“The cloud was a perfect fit for us. We wanted to stop maintaining and operating storage for endpoint backup. This is something where we really said, ‘this is not our strength, this is not our focus.’ We wanted a reliable backup solution, we wanted to be able to manage the data, but we didn’t want to deal with all the operating behind it. The cloud makes a lot of things around client backups much easier.”

Alexander Lohr

Amer Sports relied on Gartner to identify the leading endpoint data protection products, assessed the top 3 vendors, and selected Druva inSync as its global solution. There were several key factors that made inSync the right choice for the organization:

Comprehensive privacy capabilities allow Amer Sports to define settings by user, region, and role, enabling the company to meet complicated and often conflicting data privacy laws across the globe

Multiple storage region support gives the Amer Sports IT team the ability to make data storage decisions based on regional requirements and not infrastructure limitations

Unified administration console enables IT to manage all aspects of global backup, availability, and privacy from a single dashboard.

Ease of use means users can restore their own data, reducing help desk tickets and lost work time, as well as easily access their data from any device

Amer Sports deployed Druva inSync globally and selected three separate AWS regions to store their data. Employing multiple regions enabled the company to meet data residency laws requiring data not leave a certain region or nation. Because inSync supports regional administration, they were able to assign administrators within each region, allowing them to comply with local laws requiring that data in some countries only be managed by personnel also in that region.

The company leverages inSync’s granular privacy controls to meet other data protection needs in specific regions. “The data privacy challenges are completely different between the U.S. and within Europe, plus there are different laws within Asia, and overall it continues to grow increasingly gray very quickly.” For instance, in France and some other European countries, they had to ensure that no mobile devices were tracked. They also had to make sure that administrators were unable to access the data of German employees, in compliance with German privacy laws.

Since deploying inSync, Amer Sports employee adoption has been enthusiastic. The inSync mobile app provides end users easy access to their data, even if they are on the road and need to quickly load a presentation.

Since deploying inSync, Amer Sports employee adoption has been enthusiastic. The inSync mobile app provides end users easy access to their data, even if they are on the road and need to quickly load a presentation. Because users are able to restore their own data, they are able to get back to work more quickly after data loss occurs, which Amer Sports estimates saves the company €2,000 per incident. Perhaps most importantly, inSync provides data protection that is as good for the workers out of the office as those in it. “From a mobile perspective, the cloud is a great fit. We have a lot of people traveling, a lot of people on the road. When we had on-premise solutions we could not get the coverage or even the speed which Druva offers us.”

By moving to the cloud with inSync, Amer Sports hit the data protection ball out of the park. Their data is protected, compliant with a web of privacy laws, and easily available to their users on demand.